Bride and groom's wedding first dance

You have rehearsed your first dance for the twentieth time. You want it to be elegant, beautiful, perfect. Your veil and wedding dress will drift about you in a whirly waltz. Not any different than the father-daughter dance or the mother-son dance, your expression and emotion changes from second to second. As you reminisce your life that lies behind you and look forward to your amazing future, an emotional modulation from happiness to sadness; flow and ebb, flux within your soul.

(Click on an image, then use your RIGHT and LEFT arrow keys to go through all of them)

This is possibly one of the most beautiful and elegant sliver in weddings that I adore. Yet, this is possibly one of the hardest part in a wedding to photograph (other than the kiss in the church, which is all about timing). You see, lighting for photographers is akin to water to fish. Dance images are always a challenge to shoot, due to how badly lighted the dance floor is, the continual movements of bodies in motion, shifting dance lights and video lights (that the videographers uses-can cause the brightness to veer from too bright-to too dark), the different angles to capture, and most of all, all that to be photographed within 2-3 minutes.

If lady luck smiles upon you, at the end of most weddings, your photographer will hopefully end up with a good 1 to 2 decent but underexposed (aka dark or badly lighted) images. They will most likely processed it into black & white, and claim it as art, or make it into a brownish sepia and chalk it off as creative. The pictures are usually very grainy and if you danced slow enough, the images will just be a little blurred.

My recommendation? One of the biggest question to ask your photographer is to have him/her show you A DOZEN of their dance images from A SINGLE wedding. That's possibly one of the best indicator on his creativity, lighting skills and how well he can tango! To start off with the challenge, here are my dozen, shot a mere few days ago, last Saturday, for Jenn and Matt in Maggiano's Little Italy's lovely banquet room.

- Michael Soo